Tweet This Social Media Seminar

How to evaluate your social media presence, and what you can do to take advantage of free advertising!By now everyone knows that they need to use social media, from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, to get their message out. Forget delivery; the big challenge is knowing when to get the message out, what target group to reach with the message, and what the content of the message should be. There’s an art to making posts and sending tweets that get read, and our experts will tell you how to write them. To discuss this topic, the seminar featured Leigh Wright, Marketing Director for Kirkendoll Management and Duffy Franclemont of J Dog Media. Here, we’ve printed a selection of their comments.

Leigh Wright

How many of you are on social media? Where are you found: Facebook? Twitter? Tumblr? At our clubs, we looked at where our online traffic originated from. Typically, your website is your home base for branding your business online. As we found out early on, only four percent of our online traffic was being driven from our social media, so we became concerned with how to utilize it effectively. Social media is a free tool, so we needed to get on board with it; yet, we weren’t sure how to make it beneficial. For our clubs, the top three for us are Twitter, Facebook and Yelp. Yelp is where we get the most reviews and engagement, Twitter is where we had the most interaction with people in our industry. We then put a major emphasis in Google to help people find our clubs better online. We needed to find out where exactly our audience is coming from, and then we put a lot of emphasis into branded and non-branded keywords. Let’s check off some of the basics, like content. Everyone likes to throw around the phrase “going viral” and such, but it’s one of those words that will never come up in a marketing meeting. Content is about creating something sustainable for your audience; something they can look forward to, something they know is part of your brand. For example on Facebook, which has a lot of conservative rules for what we do, we can only post photos of women who are fully clothed. On Twitter, we post topless photos because we’re not a nude club, and you’d never want to brand something that you’re not. Since Twitter is our major source of traffic drivers, we put a lot of emphasis on our social authority. Also, if your club uses Twitter, I’d recommend you look inside Twitter analytics to see what the different benefits of what your content can do. For example, when is the best time for you to post something so that the content gets longer traction, or when people retweet it. And that’s a good indicator to see what people are zeroing in on from your club. The only real disparity between Facebook and Twitter is this: Twitter, which we find much more beneficial, sold their soul in February of this year to Google by giving them full rights to read all of their tweets in real time. So what this means is Google can go in and catalog and analyze everything. They can read where your keyword is next to your content. But no matter what, don’t buy any Twitter followers. With Yelp, we use a program call Moz Local. It’s a marketing platform where you type in your name, address and phone number, and they go out to about 15 different web directories, making sure that your business name and phone number is placed with businesses everywhere on the internet, like Yelp, Foursquare, YellowPages and so on. Because if you have multiple locations and your zip code is different then Google will have trouble matching those up. Just remember Google is always watching.

Duffy Franclemont

How to get around Facebook advertising—I’m an expert at cheating the system. The problem is Facebook doesn’t want you to advertise because you’re an adult entertainment business. So, you create a page for your club, but be careful—there are Facebook censors. Here’s your way around it. The first to do is get rid of anything that says “adult entertainment,” “showgirls,” “topless,” anything like that in your description. If you do include those words, post them on Sunday evening; we’ve found they don’t check then.